Any studies on user case studies as reinforcing copy?

Question

Content provider for a website heavily pushes case studies as a way of helping the user to make their financial decisions.

For example: Jane is a 32 year old single mum who works part time, she choose to do X, Bob is a 24 married man with a child who is working full time, he choose to do Y

These case studies end up being 4 paragraphs with bullet points and can sometimes number 20+

I have an opinion of how useful these case studies are but I'm wanting to know if there's any studies that have been done, I tried googling but searching for UX case studies doesn't yield anything relevant unsurprisingly.

Answer 1

One could think of case studies as marketing ploy–which they are–but they have basis in psychology.

For example Susan Weinschenk's book Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click is a very good primer when it comes to psychology in UX. In that book she talks about Social Validation.

Social validation happens when people look for their peers instead of experts to make decisions. That's the reason why in your case there seem to be people with different backgrounds. This makes people to affiliate themselves at least with someone.

Making a Google Scholar search for "social validation ux" yields some results. Some of them seem to have a link between social validation and anticipated use. If you are more interested in how people start to use technology (or accepts it), you should check out the (extended) technology acceptance model by Davis & Venkatesh.